Greg Warman
11-1-12
Eng 1510
Synthesis/Introduction
(Still debating whether to use my Baseball Team or my Xbox/Call of Duty Clan as my community)
The world, according to James Paul
Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is made up of
numerous groups, all consisting of similar people, called discourse
communities. Within these communities, the members all share a particular
Discourse, or, “saying-writing-doing-believing-being-valuing combinations”
allowing the community to have unity and allow them to easily recognize each
other and communicate with one another. Within
these discourse communities, members share similar Discourses, which can range
from things, as Gee explains, such as their literacy, their apprenticeship,
their metaknowledge, and mushfake.
Literacy and apprenticeship are more easily understood; as they are common
terms we often deal with in our own discourse communities. However,
metaknowledge and mushfake are words that may be foreign to most. Gee explains these to be shared by the people
in a community; metaknowledge being the sum of acquired knowledge held by all
members of the group. Mushfake refers to
a creation by the members of a community of something lesser than the original,
or replica made of something different, but still sufficing in their
community.
Knowing
what all entails with a discourse community as described by Gee, John Swales, a
professor of linguistics at The University of Michigan, continues the idea by
explaining six defining characteristics that, when all are met by a community,
create the discourse. These six
characteristics involve having a broadly agreed set of common public goals,
having a different means of communication among members, having events that
involves participation from all members, having a means of communicative
furtherance of the community’s aims, having specific lexis or ways of
communication, and lastly, having a range of expertise and experience in its
members.
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